Liverpool Football Club is synonymous with blooding young talent into the first team with devastating effect. Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard are the obvious examples of the success of the club’s academy over the last 20 years.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is on his way to etching his name next to those legends after taking a stranglehold on the right back position following a stunning campaign which has amassed 29 appearances – a remarkable return considering he is only 19.
But those around Liverpool know that Alexander-Arnold’s success is just the start and we have barely scratched the surface of the youth prospects available to the club.
However, while a new golden generation awaits, chances this term have been hard to come by for the plethora of young talent who are patiently awaiting their opportunity to write their first chapter with Liverpool’s first team.
Eagles rookie tackle Jordan Mailata is new to football.
So new that he had difficulty buckling his chin strap and looking through a facemask during Friday’s practice at the NovaCare Complex.
“I was fidgeting with my helmet,” Mailata, a 20-year-old former rugby player from Australia, said afterward. “My head felt like it was being choked. I had to pop it off once in a while and take a breather.”
Mailata, the Eagles’ seventh-round pick in this year’s NFL draft, is a huge project in more ways than one.
At 6-foot-8 and 346 pounds, he’s both the tallest and heaviest player on the roster. He’s two inches taller than quarterback Nick Foles and Pro Bowl tackle Lane Johnson. He’s six pounds heavier than new defensive tackle Haloti Ngata.
… Prior to Thursday’s start, manager Aaron Boone shared some thoughts on the current “crafty lefty” edition of Sabathia. “He can really pitch. We’ve talked about it over and over again, the evolution of CC from a dominant power pitcher to this point in his career where he’s made the transition, obviously with less stuff but no less ability to pitch,” said Boone. “I think the cut fastball for him has been a game-changer. It’s allowed him to consistently be able to get right-handed hitters out… With that cut fastball to set up his breaking ball and his changeup, it’s been a lot of fun to watch him go out and do his craft, if you will.”
When Manchester City unveiled their state-of-the-art £200m Etihad training complex in December 2014, it included football’s most advanced altitude chamber.
Users were able to quickly simulate any playing environment, from heights of sea level to 5,000m and temperatures from extreme lows to 40 degrees. Skipper Vincent Kompany soon stepped inside, tweeting a picture of himself on a treadmill with a simulated altitude of 2339m, 15% oxygen and a temperature of 36 degrees.
City’s fit-out was done by The Altitude Centre, the UK’s leading supplier of simulated altitude training systems for elite teams. The London company has a host of Premier League and Football League clients, including Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool, as well as the Football Association, who had an environmental chamber fitted at St George’s Park in 2012.
… John Fitzpatrick has been at Newcastle United for more than five years and has a background in physiotherapy. However, his career path has seen him get involved with sports science and he is completing a PhD in the subject at Northumbria University.
From humble beginnings, the programme at Newcastle now extends to the entire first team and many of the youth teams, monitoring training and potential.
“When I started at Newcastle five years ago we had five GPS units,” he explains. “We would select five players at random and take the average to inform what we did in training. We now have 100 so every player from the first team to the U-18 teams are analysed every match which gives us hundreds of variables and allows us to be more proactive with the data.”
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett from
Sports coaches are always on the look out for new ideas to improve their players’ performance and it’s understandable that insights from psychology and neuroscience hold particular appeal. However, as with other applied fields, it’s not easy to translate neuroscience findings into useful sports interventions. There are also a lot of charlatans who use the mystique of the brain to sell quack sports products and programmes. Without specialist neuroscience training, coaches might struggle to distinguish genuine brain insights from neuro-based flimflam.
It’s in this context that a group of researchers, led by Richard Bailey at the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education in Berlin, thought it would be useful to see which scientifically challenged practices sports coaches use, and whether they are able to identify brain facts from myths. Previous work has identified widespread belief in neuromyths among several other groups, including psychology students, music teachers and neuroscience graduates, but this is the first time sports coaches have been tested.
Reporting their results in Frontiers in Psychology, Bailey and his colleagues found that sports coaches endorsed, on average, just over 40 per cent of the six brain myths presented to them. “The figure is substantial enough to warrant concern,” according to Bailey and his colleagues “because it is likely that these beliefs will shape coaching philosophy and practice.”
Scott Barry Kaufman was placed in special education classes as a kid. He struggled with auditory information processing and with anxiety.
But with the support of his mother, and some teachers who saw his creativity and intellectual curiosity, Kaufman ended up with degrees from Yale and Cambridge.
Now he’s a psychologist who cares passionately about a holistic approach to education, one that recognizes the capacity within each child. He recently edited a volume of experts writing about how to reach students like himself: Twice Exceptional: Supporting And Educating Bright And Creative Students With Learning Difficulties.
I spoke with him about ways schools and teachers can help these twice exceptional, or “2E,” students thrive. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Researchers from the University of St. Andrews, U.K., have demonstrated ultrathin, ultra-lightweight, flexible organic lasers that can operate as free-standing membranes or can be transferred onto a substrate, such as a contact lens (Nat. Commun., doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03874-w). While not exactly enabling Superman’s laser vision, these flexible organic optoelectronic devices, according to the research team, could be harnessed for new applications in security, biophotonics and medicine.
… Since this appears to be such a common question, and ultimately a misunderstanding on how neural networks/deep learning object detectors actually work, I decided to revisit the topic of deep learning object detection in today’s blog post.
Objective: Sport research often requires human motion capture of an athlete. It can, however, be labour-intensive and difficult to select the right system, while manufacturers report on specifications which are determined in set-ups that largely differ from sport research in terms of volume, environment and motion. The aim of this review is to assist researchers in the selection of a suitable motion capture system for their experimental set-up for sport applications. An open online platform is initiated, to support (sport)researchers in the selection of a system and to enable them to contribute and update the overview. Design: systematic review; Method: Electronic searches in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar were performed, and the reference lists of the screened articles were scrutinised to determine human motion capture systems used in academically published studies on sport analysis. Results: An overview of 17 human motion capture systems is provided, reporting the general specifications given by the manufacturer (weight and size of the sensors, maximum capture volume, environmental feasibilities), and calibration specifications as determined in peer-reviewed studies. The accuracy of each system is plotted against the measurement range. Conclusion: The overview and chart can assist researchers in the selection of a suitable measurement system. To increase the robustness of the database and to keep up with technological developments, we encourage researchers to perform an accuracy test prior to their experiment and to add to the chart and the system overview (online, open access).
There are decisions that ruin games and then there are decisions that ruin seasons, and Mets fans should appreciate that difference as well as any sports enthusiasts on this planet.
Mickey Callaway made one call Sunday afternoon that cost the Mets a game, a 4-2 loss to the Phillies at Citizens Bank. Prior to that, he committed to a move that might have saved the Mets’ season.
Yet Callaway isn’t the only rookie Mets official constantly put on the line. Each time Yoenis Cespedes grimaces in pain on the field, the Mets’ new medical officials step up to the plate for their own big moment.
“Every day, they make a judgment whether he’s a DL or not,” Mets assistant general manager John Ricco said of the Mets’ performance folks after Cespedes fought through his achy right quad to homer, single and make three catches in left field. “We’ve been conservative with [Jacob] deGrom, conservative with [Todd] Frazier. We’re not afraid to put a guy on [the disabled list] if the circumstances warrant, and right now, that’s not what [is recommended].”
Engineering professor Luís Amaral has investigated complex social and structural networks in areas ranging from healthcare and biology to gender discrimination and gun violence. His diverse research interests and innate curiosity eventually led him to study soccer — his favorite sport.
Amaral used his knowledge of network complexity to create an algorithm that objectively ranks professional soccer players. With the help of students in his lab, Amaral built a network for each team, which reflected who passed the ball to whom, how accurate those passes were, and how likely those passes were to end in a goal.
Before Amaral’s algorithm, the only way to identify stellar soccer players was by listening to sports pundits. Amaral’s lab developed the first objective, data-driven system for understanding who to watch on soccer fields across the globe.
Using sophisticated coding techniques and analytical tools, Amaral’s team created what they termed an “Average Footballer Rating” (AFR) for each player, based on how influential they are in soccer matches. Taken together, the AFR values of all players on a given team indicate that team’s strength — its success at making passes that result in goals. For people who follow soccer, the top three players – Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr., Cristiano Ronaldo — are no surprise.
… Crunch the numbers on the 2018 MLB season, and one team stands out as being far luckier than any other in one key metric. That team is the Blue Jays, and the stat is Cluster Luck.
As any baseball fan from T-ball to the big leagues can tell you, hits tend to lead to runs. But contrary to popular myths about clutch (or unclutch) hitting, players and teams have little control over when they collect those hits. So when a group of hitters fares particularly well in clustering hits together in the same inning, or a group of pitchers fares particularly well in scattering hits across multiple innings, we can conclude that there’s a lot of luck in play.
Sports statistician and analyst Ed Feng tracks every major league team’s results when it comes to clustering hits (for hitters) and scattering hits (for pitchers), using a stat called Cluster Luck. By that measure, the Jays hitters have scored about 18 more runs than you’d expect if their hit clustering occurred at league-average levels. Blue Jays pitchers have allowed about 12 fewer runs than you’d expect if they’d scattered their hits allowed at league-average levels. All told, the Jays have derived a benefit of about 30 runs this season from random hit clustering and scattering alone.
That makes Toronto the luckiest team in baseball so far in 2018 by a wide margin.
… It seems obvious that some keepers are massively undervalued. The question is can we prove it?
Ted Knutson, who worked on player recruitment at Brentford and the Danish club FC Midtjylland and heads the football consultancy StatsBomb, believes so. As he explained during a presentation at South Bank University last week, keepers are often harder to evaluate than other positions. They need to sweep up, distribute the ball accurately and start attacks as well as keep clean sheets. Yet the data isn’t always there to properly assess their strengths and weaknesses.
Save percentage, for instance, matters little if every shot goes down a keeper’s throat. And while looking at how a keeper performs compared with the expected goals (xG) they are predicted to concede is more robust, it doesn’t take into account defensive pressure or the power of a shot.